Online MBA Forum

# posted by Mary @ 12:33 PM  

I wonder what exactly you could do with an online degree in Scientific Management. Would you just be like an office manager or a HR person for organizations whose employees are scientists? Would you be like their supervisor? How much of a background in science would you need to have? Maybe I'll look up that online degree myself to find out. Now I'm really curious.
 

Well, scientific management is an interesting area, as it often happens outside large constructs, but it needs financing, marketing and management in the same way as any other business.

Think about the way that some of the small biotechnology companies have developed, creating small companies and then finding funding, growing themselves etc. Just think how useful a specialized online MBA would be to help you solve your probelms.
 

I have both an MBA and a PhD in strategic management and work with scientists. It seems to me that managing a business is just that. Whether your key workers come from one profession or another is, to some extent, not the most important issue. Managing professional experts from any field entails its own problems - acturaires, engineers, traders, lawyers, medicos, scientists.

The more highly credentialled by university qualifications their profession is, the more, in my view, difficult they can be to work with. There can be a high level of arrogance that is not well founded in demonstrated performance and an unwillingness to acknowledge how much planning, thinking ahead and coordinating with others is involved in achieving most significant outcomes.The fine art of balancing the need for all of these with the need for innovation and discovery is a crucial issue. The team can put waaaay too much emphasis on independence (and therefore, not inspection, accountability, repsonsibility etc) - as if they somehow guarantee innovation. But not all independence results in innovation - a principle of falsifiability that they never seem to apply to this issue...

In terms of targeting an addressable market segment, I can see there would be value in a science management degree. But it would be valuable for all those managing professions. The strategic and investment issues for R&D are, however, very distinctive and merit particular attention.